One forest has replaced another, just as-in the poem-one choice will supplant another. An inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these woods were “new”-full of trees that had grown after older ones had been decimated. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species,” the first trees to come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires.

The leaves of both turn bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red and orange. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detail-the yellow leaves-and makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, “The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. … Mea culpa.” However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never quite allowing one to supplant the other-even as “The Road Not Taken” describes how choice is inevitable. Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and-in retrospect-often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. Robert Frost wrote “ The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas.

The road not taken tone